61 quotes
Because energy is not restrained by other elements that are at once antagonistic and cooperative, action proceeds by jerks and spasms. There is discontinuity.
Art as Experience (1934)
It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well-put is half-solved.
Logic: Theory of Inquiry (1938)
As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.
So we are always esthetically disappointed when the sensuous qualities and the intellectual properties of an object do not coalesce.
Art as Experience (1934)
Legislation is a matter of more or less intelligent improvisation aiming at palliating conditions by means of patchwork policies.
Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very exceptional. And measuring originality by deviation from the mass breeds eccentricity in them.
Even the eye that is artificially trained to see color as color, apart from things that colors qualify, cannot shut out the resonances and transfers of value.
Art as Experience (1934)
Unless the materials involved can be traced back to the material of common sense concern there is nothing whatever for scientific concern to be concerned with.
What happens in the movement of art is emergence of new materials of experience demanding expression, and therefore involving in their expression new forms and techniques.
Art as Experience (1934)
The way our group or class does things tends to determine the proper objects of attention, and thus prescribe the directions and limits of observation and memory.
The worst thing about stubbornness of mind, about prejudices, is that they arrest development; they shut off the mind from new stimuli. Open-mindedness means retention of the childlike attitude; closed-mindedness means premature intellectual old age.
Democracy and Education (1916)
It cannot be inserted too strongly That what is not immediate is not esthetic.
Art as Experience (1934)
Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth, something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.
But the individual butterfly or earthquake remains just the unique existence which it is. We forget in explaining its occurrence that it is only the occurrence that is explained, not the thing itself.
Time and Individuality (1940)
Individuality, conceived as a temporal development involves uncertainty, indeterminacy, or contingency. Individuality is the source of whatever is unpredictable in the world.
Time and Individuality (1940)
Naturalism is a word of many meetings in philosophy as well as in art. like most isms — classicism and romanticism, idealism and realism in art — it’s has become an emotional term, a war cry of partisans.
Art as Experience (1934)
Equally there is no rhythm when variations are not placed. There is a wealth of suggestions in the phrase “takes place”. The change not only comes but it belongs; it had its definite place in a larger whole.
Art as Experience (1934)
No work of art can be instantaneously perceived because there is the no opportunity for conservation and increase in tension, and hence none for that release and unfolding which gives volume to a work of art.
Art as Experience (1934)
The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence.
Form may then be defined as the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfillment.
Art as Experience (1934)